DC Film Society: Adam's Rib June 2020

Modern Classics: Cast Away

Cast Away, 2000 – directed by Robert Zemeckis. Written by William Broyles Jr. Produced by Steven J. Boyd, Joan Bradshaw, Tom Hanks, Cherylanne Martin, Jack Rapke, Steve Starkey and Robert Zemeckis. Key Cast: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Nick Searcy, Lari White and Chris Noth.

Quiet. That’s what jumped out at me when I watched Cast Away again a couple of weeks ago. The film features so many moments without dialogue, music or any sound other than waves crashing. Arthouse and independent films may be quiet sometimes, but rarely a big-budget Hollywood studio film, which Cast Away most certainly was. So many movies need to throw constant stimulation to the audience, as if we would grow bored otherwise. Cast Away, in so many ways, is a refreshing change.

It’s no surprise that many critics and fans returned to Cast Away in recent weeks. Even my wife, who has seen the film several times, got hooked again when she rewatched Cast Away with me. While there’s not an exact parallel between the COVID-19 quarantines and the situation Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) faces in the film, the general themes still resonate. Many of us had our lives suddenly turned upside down as Chuck did and can identify with his isolation. Chuck’s priorities before he was stranded on the island mean little once he got there. I’d guess that those who have dealt with the virus also had their priorities shift. We have had to conduct our lives differently to some degree. That includes Tom Hanks, who contracted the virus along with his wife Rita. They were the first major celebrities to have COVID-19 and quarantine themselves. The news about Hanks hit home that anyone could get the virus. Twenty years after Cast Away hit theaters, life was eerily resembling art.

In the mid-90s, Hanks had the idea that would become Cast Away. The “person stranded on a deserted island” has been a subject of literature and pop culture for centuries, but Hanks was intrigued by how a modern man might react to it. He enlisted screenwriter William Broyles Jr., who had co-written Apollo 13, to develop the idea. After a few years and many rewrites later, director Robert Zemeckis came on board. Zemeckis and Hanks had teamed up for the mega-hit Best Picture winner Forrest Gump in 1994. I have to think that their collective track record was the only way this film could have gotten made. I could imagine the pitch meeting: “We are going to take the biggest star on the planet and keep him by himself for 75 minutes. He’ll be doing things like making a shelter and opening coconuts. His only companion will be a volleyball. Oh, by the way, we will also need to shut down production midway for a year, so the star can lose weight.” Would any studio have said yes without Hanks and Zemeckis attached?

Ironically, Cast Away is the exact inverse of Forrest Gump. Gump meets Elvis Presley, JFK, LBJ, Abie Hoffman, Richard Nixon and John Lennon. He repeatedly runs back-and-forth across America. Noland spends most of Cast Away stuck in one place and doesn’t meet anyone.

On the Cast Away DVD commentary track, Zemeckis explained how critical Hanks’s stardom was to the film. Zemeckis didn’t need to do much with Chuck before the ill-fated flight because audiences already knew who a Tom Hanks character was. The story builds on that archetype for just enough time showing Chuck, who works as a FedEx troubleshooter, as a man obsessed with time. He exclaims to Russian FedEx staff that “Time rules over us without mercy,” and “We live and die by the clock.” The camera work here is frenetic, just as Chuck behaves. It only slows down slightly when we meet Chuck’s girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt), but we don’t have much time with the two of them together.

In fact, the film only spends 20 minutes with Chuck before he boards the doomed flight. After a harrowing plane crash, one of the most thrilling ever put on screen , Chuck arrives at the island just past 30 minutes into the film. He will spend more than half of the movie there. Zemeckis and his team scoured the globe for the right island and finally settled on one in Fiji. It’s tropical, but not so much that you’d want to vacation there. More importantly, it conveys the remoteness needed to believe that no one can find Chuck and that he’s all alone. The film’s visual effects provide the finishing touches to the island, but in a seamless way that still holds up 20 years later.

Just as Chuck’s situation radically changes, so does the film. We don’t see Kelly or anyone else Chuck left behind. No music at all and no sounds from any other creatures, even insects. The only sounds not coming from Chuck are the waves crashing, and occasional thunderstorms. The camera becomes gentle, either staying still or moving slowly, unobtrusively following Chuck. All of this creates a Zen quality that permeates the island sections of the film. Sometimes Zemeckis cuts to a wide shot showing how small Chuck becomes compared to his new environment. Everything that meant so much to Chuck is rendered useless. Time no longer rules him. Survival does. Life is stripped down to its essentials. Chuck’s initial efforts to get help and leave the island fail miserably. Its man vs. nature, and nature wins in a rout.

During this initial segment on the island Cast Away invokes so much drama from relatively simple acts such as breaking a coconut for food, securing drinking water, finding shelter, burying one of the pilots that dies in the crash, and of course building a fire. Zemeckis explained that he built each of these actions as its own three act story. Chuck’s struggle, failure, more struggle and then hard-earned success with fire brings him and the audience back to our ancestral times. We share Chuck’s joy from these basic tasks, just as we shared his earlier trauma and sorrow.

Much of the credit for this identification must go to Hanks himself. There’s a truth so old it’s now a cliché: much of acting is reacting. Actors play off other actors. For so much of the movie Hanks is alone, which is one of the more difficult types of a performance. He needs to generate all of the emotion and pathos. He has to hold the audience by himself. Somehow Hanks makes his solo work on the island look easy. While Hanks won his Oscars for Philadelphia and Gump, Cast Away is his magnum opus.

Proof of his achievement comes in the island’s other “character,” Wilson the volleyball. On the surface this could easily come across as a story gimmick, a way for Chuck to externalize what he’s feeling. But look closer. As one of the DVD extras emphasizes, Wilson’s face literally comes from Chuck’s blood. Everything Wilson “says” (and you can usually figure it out) is actually from another side of Chuck. That we accept and even grow to love Wilson all comes from Hanks.

When the film makes its four-year time jump, it feels a little jarring. Gone is the pudgy, pasty, overwhelmed and under equipped Chuck. In his place is a lean, blond, shaggy and weary warrior. Island life has become second nature, and he has mastered survival. Zemeckis shut down production for a year while Hanks lost weight and grew out a mangy beard, which imbues Chuck’s transition with authenticity. To keep his crew intact, Zemeckis used them on another movie, What Lies Beneath, which he filmed entirely during the Cast Away hiatus.

Part of the reason this segment on the island succeeds comes from Broyles’s background research for the screenplay, in which enlisted the help of real survivalists. Earlier in the story, when Chuck opens some FedEx packages that have drifted ashore, Broyles imagined what would seemingly be the most useless on a desert island and came up with ice skates, videotape, and a mesh party dress. Then Broyles went back to the survivalists and asked what they would do with these items. They told him they would use the blades on the ice skates as a knife, use the videotape as a rope, and the mesh dress as a net. Broyles incorporates all of those uses in the story, especially when Chuck makes his second attempt to leave the island.

Hanks explained in a television interview that original drafts of the screenplay had Chuck rescued on the island. One of the film’s production designers said that the island “stands in judgement of Chuck.” Chuck needs to get himself off the island and earn his rescue. On the island he had to let go of who he was off the island. Now leaving the island he again has to let go of what served him before, as he loses Wilson. It’s a scene so heartbreaking that we have to remind ourselves that we are mourning for an inexpensive inanimate object.

Back in civilization, Hanks plays Chuck very differently. He’s has a presence, a stillness that wasn’t there before. On one hand Chuck’s reborn, but on the other hand he is unsure of his place in a world that now feels foreign to him. Zemeckis and Hanks wisely underplay a key scene. After a welcoming party, Chuck scans the trays of leftover seafood (You’d think his friends would serve something else to a man who’d spent four years on an island, but never mind). Chuck picks up a butane lighter and flicks it on and off a few times. Hanks does not verbalize Chuck’s thoughts and Zemeckis eschews a flashback. They both trust the audience to think back to Chuck’s struggle for food and fire and make the contrast for themselves.

Now with a husband and child, Kelly does not leave them for Chuck, despite an emotional romantic reunion. On the commentary track Zemeckis explained that younger audiences were upset that Kelly did not go back to Chuck, but that older audiences understood why she made that choice. Besides, a traditional “happily ever after” ending would have cheapened everything that had come before. It would have showed that Chuck could bend life to his will, which is not what the island taught him. Instead the film offers Chuck a ray of hope in the form of Bettina (Lari White), whom he meets at a literal crossroad. But he will need to pursue her and prove himself worthy, just as he did to leave the island.

In early April, my wife tested positive for COVID-19. I followed suit a couple of weeks later. Our symptoms were relatively mild, although hers were more severe than mine. Somehow knowing Tom Hanks had overcome COVID in real life gave us some hope. Thankfully, we have both recently tested negative. But during some of the darker days, I would go back to another key scene towards the end of Cast Away. When Kelly doesn’t go back to him, Chuck unburdens himself to his friend Stan (Nick Searcy), which Hanks masterfully pulls off in an uninterrupted 3½ minute take. After describing his pain Chuck rebounds with “I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?” Just as true now as when I saw the film 20 years ago.

Adam Spector
June 1, 2020